Thanks to the suggestion from Sam Penrose I’m going to go read “Big Ball of Mud,” which I hadn’t encountered before, for the next installment of Code Reads. Looks fascinating.
The paper can be found here (or here in PDF). There was a good previous discussion of the paper over on Dan Lyke’s Flutterby.
Last week I was reviewing my Dreaming in Code slides and talk, which include a brief discussion of the old question, “Why can’t making software be more like building bridges?” when the news hit of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. In the book I used the long and painful stop-start process of the Bay Bridge replacement (a bridge that stopped for a redesign in mid-construction!) as one example of how bridge building may not be as reliable and predictable an undertaking as we think; the Minneapolis tragedy is another example.
At least it’s getting people thinking. For those interested in further reading, there’s Stephen Wolfram’s fascinating post suggesting that future bridge designs may emerge from the sort of mathematical explorations his software has enabled:
what should the bridges of the future look like? Probably a lot less regular than today. Because I suspect the most robust structures will end up being ones with quite a lot of apparent randomness….we’re going to end up being exposed to something really quite new. Something that exists in the abstract computational universe, but that we’re “mining” for the very first time to create structures we want.
Computerworld reports on new systems that allow the placement of acoustic sensors on bridges to provide better feedback mechanisms than today’s routines of visual inspection.
I was also reminded of a thorough and informative paper from 1986 that I came across in my Dreaming in Code research: “Case Study: A Computer Science Perspective on Bridge Design,” by Alfred Spector and David Gifford. (There’s a PDF available here.) This paper outlines the more mature and rigorous process of designing and specifying a new bridge and systematically compares it to the looser and less clearly defined processes we use in so much software engineering.
[tags]bridges, software engineering, stephen wolfram[/tags]
At the end of an LA Times profile of Matt Drudge, journalism teacher and expert Tom Rosenstiel admits that Drudge has “come to play an important role”:
In a study of the online medium’s election-night performance in November, Rosenstiel says his group found that Drudge quickly sent his audience to the best destinations. “He had figured out in real time what we figured out more conclusively in hindsight,” Rosenstiel says.
When the balance of the Senate came down to the race in Virginia, for example, Drudge linked to the secretary of state’s office for updated tallies. The resulting flood of visitors crashed the government site.
Still, Rosenstiel says, “Drudge is vulnerable because he’s not producing anything. He’s just got muscle through his links to the work of others.”
One day, he says, news organizations are going to say, “We’re not going to give this stuff away to Drudge. We need to get some source of revenue to subsidize the creation of the content.”
Although Drudge has spent years taking aim at the mainstream media, Rosenstiel says, the truth is he needs their links for his livelihood.
“The dirty little secret about Drudge,” Rosenstiel says, “is that he’s a gateway for conventional journalism.”
I found this a fascinatingly muddled perspective. On the one hand, Rosenstiel says, Drudge is doing something better than the big newsrooms: figuring out where to send his visitors in real time. On the other hand, he’s vulnerable because all he’s doing is linking to other people. Rosenstiel describes a situation in which the big, established publications know that Drudge can send them firehose-level traffic; yet he somehow concludes that it’s Drudge who “needs” the media’s “links for his livelihood.” In fact, he’s just described the precise reverse. Then there’s the threat that the media might somehow stop “giving this stuff away” to Drudge. But nobody’s giving anything away to Drudge — when we publish on the Web, we hand the URL to everyone. How exactly would you boycott Drudge without also sequestering your work from the entire Web?
I’m no fan of Drudge; I’ll visit other filters, thank you. But vast swarms of people clearly like his approach. He had a first-mover advantage but he’s also found a formula that works. If many people are choosing Drudge as their “front page” over the front pages of newspaper sites and magazine sites and portals, the appropriate question to ask is, why? Why is a low-budget two-person operation satisfying some significant chunk of the public better than the formidable resources of the big newsrooms?
Rosenstiel, lost in the same “who stole our business model?” fog that is enveloping so many of his colleagues at the journalism schools and in the newsrooms, doesn’t even notice this question buried in his contradictory statements. Sure, these new Web news models erode the underlying media businesses that pay newsroom salaries. But the answer isn’t to ignore customers’ preferences and threaten to take your marbles home. That’s the RIAA strategy the music industry pursued, and look how successful it proved.
Editors and publishers need to start by accepting reality. Drudge’s neo-Walter Winchell act is simply one example of what the Web does to the news: It places new “front ends” on the mainstream news back-end — remixing new front pages to the pool of news the network aggregates. The algorithmic editing of sites like Memeorandum is another example. The communal editing of Digg is another. Here’s yet another, which, apparently, springs in part from the efforts of Michael “Burn Rate” Wolff. (See this piece in today’s Times about Wolff and Newser.) Despite that, I rather like it. (In fact, it’s where I found that Drudge profile in the first place.)
Why aren’t today’s newspaper editors conducting more of these experiments themselves? Why have they ceded the field to twentysomething entrepreneurs and marginal mavericks? Obviously, institutional inertia, turf-protection reflexes and disappearing-profit panic are all potent forces. On a deeper level, I think most editors just hate the idea that readers might prefer an alternative mix of their news product. They’d rather go down with their ships than accept a demotion of their authority.
[tags]matt drudge, newser, newspaper industry, tom rosenstiel[/tags]
I took a quick trip to the DC area at the end of last week to talk about Dreaming in Code to the folks at The Motley Fool. It was a blast. The Fool, as it’s known, has been around online from the earliest days of the Web; like Salon, it’s had its ups and downs, weathered many storms, and is now in a growth phase again.
The engagement happened because a developer who worked for the company happened to read the book, liked it, and thought it would be a good topic for the rest of the company to learn more about it. What I heard from the “Fools”, as they call themselves, is the same thing I’ve heard from lots of other software developers: they feel that the book captures the elusive nature of their work, and they want their colleagues to read it to learn, in greater depth, about the difficulties of creating software.
I’m home for a few days, then heading up to Seattle for Gnomedex. It’s an event I’ve heard about for years, but never made it up there before. If you’re going too, let me know!
[tags]dreaming in code, motley fool, gnomedex[/tags]
This morning the New York Times joined much of the rest of the American newspaper industry in shrinking its pages. The result for it — as for the Wall Street Journal, which made the same change recently — is that the paper now feels like a toy. Oh, sure, we’ll get used to the change. But at a time when all these papers are already watching their gravitas ebbing away, this change — designed to save printing, paper and distribution costs — is a self-inflicted wound.
The Times says it’s losing 11 percent of its column-inches, but making half of that up by adding pages. The op-ed and editorial pages are permanently smaller, though. And look where the Times — like the Journal before it — decided to cut back: the letters to the editor. (Originally, the Journal also buried its letters page far from the editorials; after a hue and cry from its readers, the letters got shoved back to the flip-side of the editorial page.)
Here we are, in the middle of a vast transformation of the news media from a one-way broadcast mode into a many-to-many free-for-all, and, when push comes to shove, the great newspapers of America decide that the one place they can afford to cut back is the paltry few columns they have traditionally dedicated to their readers.
It’s hard to see this as anything other than another twist on a long downward spiral.
[tags]newspapers, new york times[/tags]
It is no surprise that Rupert Murdoch will be the new owner of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal: This was inevitable from the moment he put his money on the table (at a share price approaching double the market value).
Nor is there any surprise in the ritualistic pronouncements being heard throughout the world of traditional journalism — beginning on the Journal’s own editorial page with assurances from both the editorial column and the paper’s publisher that standards will be upheld and independence will be maintained, and spreading far and wide. These assertions are inevitable. Equally inevitably, they will be trotted out to be quoted, with suitable irony, the first time the paper’s new owner throws his weight around and demonstrates their irrelevance.
So the Journal will now have an oversight committee of some sort — a figleaf-shaped offering to pacify the consciences of those members of the Bancroft family who felt some remorse at grabbing Murdoch’s cash. Murdoch will pay no more attention to the oversight of such a committee than the president his TV network helped elect pays his congressional overseers. (Congress, at least, has some constitutional authority.)
And why should he? He paid good money for the Journal. The Journal is a property first and foremost. Under our economic system — the one that the Journal has always championed — owners are free to manage their properties. It is this cold reality, far more than any specific fears about how Murdoch will wreck the Journal’s newsroom (which is full of great talent but which many outsiders in the profession see as overstaffed and underworked), that has so many journalists wringing their hands.
The truth is that most professional journalists in the U.S. have lived in a cocoon for decades. The so-called Chinese wall that separates the newsroom from the business side is typically framed as a noble device for insuring that advertiser cash does not influence news coverage. That’s an important goal. But in practice these walls are only as strong as the ethical principles of those who maintain them. Pair a bullying publisher with a weak-willed editor and no wall will help.
Meanwhile, these walls have had a more insidious effect on the newsroom side: they have encouraged journalists to pay no attention to the economic basis for their work. Most editorial employees in major-city newsrooms, protected by their unions and shielded from the “dark side” of business by the traditional wall, end up thinking of their jobs as the journalistic equivalent of endowed university chairs.
This worked as long as the news business remained healthily profitable — and, in many areas, a monopoly. But in the past couple of decades, technological change has knocked over the business’s foundations. The endowments are going bankrupt. The walls are crumbling.
Journalists’ reactions to all this have generally fallen into two camps. Some dream that the old order can somehow be reconstituted. Find an angel investor who doesn’t mind losing money! Set up non-profit newsrooms! Do anything as long as you can find a way to maintain the journalist’s state of purity!
Others have looked at the changing business and said, no way are we going to be able to beat this, so let’s join it. Let’s take the principles we understand — accuracy and fairness and independence and speaking truth to power — and see how we can ferry them into the new environment.
Doing so requires some level of entrepreneurial thinking. You can’t avoid getting your hands a little grubby. You can’t sit back and let somebody else worry about the “dark side” while you keep yourself immaculate. But you don’t get stuck in the powerless, paralyzing backwaters of so many of today’s newsrooms, either. You trade in the infantilizing paternalism of the old-school newsroom for a level of autonomy that is precious.
I made this choice when I left the San Francisco Examiner in 1995; many others have made it since. It’s not easy. But there are plenty of examples of success. Salon is the one I’m most familiar with, but there are a million experiments out there — from big-name blogs and blog networks to tiny local sites to niche news efforts.
Some of these manage to pull off the neat trick of staying afloat and staying ethical; others don’t. But none that aims to pay a staff has the luxury of pretending that it’s not a business. Now the Wall Street Journal’s journalists face the same choice.
I don’t trust Rupert Murdoch. He has a long and well-documented record of using his properties to further his own agenda. But I trust that there are a lot of smart writers and editors at the Journal. Either they’ll get an opportunity to reshape their paper in a way that suits the times and their own consciences — or they’ll find themselves in the great newsroom diaspora with the rest of us, helping figure out new models for the future.
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, dow jones, rupert murdoch, new media, newspapers[/tags]
Bill Gates took a kind of victory lap in the press on Monday, with dueling big pieces in the Times and the Journal marking his steadily advancing separation from the company he started three decades ago. While the Journal concentrated on the role that Craig Mundie will take over from Gates — as Microsoft’s long-term software thinker — John Markoff’s Times piece featured some choice quotes from the soon-to-retire founder himself.
First, there was Gates the Google-baiter, adopting a role he has played a lot in recent years:
“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” he asked. “They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”
Then there was Gates the true believer in software:
The center of gravity in the computer industry has dramatically shifted toward software, he said. “Why do you like your iPod, your iPhone, your Xbox 360, your Google Search?” he said. “The real magic sauce is not the parts that we buy for the Xbox, or the parts that Apple buys for iPhones, it’s the software that goes into it.”
Finally, there was Gates the slightly tongue-tied global debugger:
Mr. Gates insists that his new world of philanthropy will be just as compelling as software has been. “I’ll have also malaria vaccine or tuberculosis vaccine or curriculum in American high schools, which are also things that, at least the way my mind works, I sit there and say, ‘Oh, God! This is so important; this is so solvable,’ ” he said, “You’ve just got to get the guy who understands this, and this new technology will bring these things together.”
If that’s the spirit that has inspired Gates to use his fortune for good causes, then one should probably not complain. But there is something so very naive about this richest-man-in-the-world’s can-do engineering spirit.
Problems? You’ve just got to get the “guy who understands”! Give him the right technology! And all will be well.
[tags]microsoft, google, bill gates, philanthropy, new york times, john markoff[/tags]
Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)
The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)
As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”
[tags]death, myspace, online memorials, salon[/tags]
Nick Kristof’s New York Times column today (behind the pay wall, alas) summarizes the findings of a book by Bryan Caplan titled “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.” Kristof quotes this summary of the book’s thesis, in Caplan’s words: “This book develops an alternative story of how democracy fails. The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.”
What are the ways in which voters are “worse than ignorant”? Kristof summarizes Caplan’s complaints of “systematic error” in voter rationality: Voters share “a suspicion of market outcomes and a desire to control markets.” They have “an anti-foreign bias,” evidenced by an unwillingness to embrace free trade wholeheartedly. They share “a neo-Luddite bias against productivity gains that come from downsizing or “creative destruction.'” And they have a “pessimistic bias, a tendency to exaggerate economic problems.”
Gee, it sounds like the real problem Caplan has with the voting public is that they don’t agree with the program of conservative economists!
There are a couple of ironies here.
There’s something hilarious about a market-oriented economist complaining about “irrational” behavior. Free-market theory depends on the notion that market participants are rational actors; if they’re irrational, then the whole theory collapses — the market doesn’t behave predictably. For classical economics to work, we need to trade in the populace and get us a better one. The whole thing reminds me of Brecht’s sarcastic suggestion that “the government dissolve the people and elect another.”
But let’s not knock the rabble so fast. Those voters may not be so irrational after all. Free-market economists wish that voters whose jobs are threatened by foreign competition would somehow become farseeing altruists, and trust that the general benefit that free trade provides might eventually lift their boats sometime after the same tide put them out of work. But these “ignorant,” “irrational” voters insist on trying to protect their jobs. The nerve! Why should they think it’s all right to act in their own short-term self-interest? Oh, right, it’s only CEOs and hedge-fund investors who have the economists’ blessing for short-term, self-centered thinking.
Personally, I’m reasonably comfortable with the pro-free-trade argument. But you won’t find me sneering at those who sense that the dynamic of the global economy is not doing them or their families any good.
Caplan is an economist at George Mason University, which (among many other things) is a center for conservative libertarian thinking. His Web site includes a “Libertarian purity test” and his “intellectual autobiography” is replete with references to Ayn Rand — so his perspective, while blinkered, is hardly surprising. But I wonder why Kristof presented the economist’s ideas so uncritically.
[tags]globalization, economics, bryan caplan, libertarians[/tags]
